Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Solving the hypergamy problem

The USA, and most of the West, has taken the approach that encouraging female participation in advanced education will strengthen their economies. Events have thus far failed to confirm those assumptions, and indeed, are increasingly calling them into question. That may be one reason Iran feels emboldened to take the opposite approach:

Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. 'The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.' The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women."

According to the mainstream Western assumption, this should weaken Iran's economy and impoverish its society. So, barring a war that will render any potential comparisons irrelevant, this move by Iran promises to make for an unusually informative societal experiment in comparison with the control group of the USA. If Iran sees non-immigrant-driven population growth along with greater societal wealth and scientific advancement, it will justify the doubts of those who questioned the idea that encouraging women to pursue science degrees instead of husbands and careers instead of children would prove beneficial to society at large.

Of course, the Iranian action presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.

No doubt the Iranian approach will sound abhorrent to many men and women alike. But consider it from a macro perspective. The USA is in well along the process of removing most of its prime female genetics from its gene pool as surely as if it took those women out and shot them before they reached breeding age. Which society's future would you bet on, the one that is systematically eliminating the genes of its best and brightest women or the one that is intent upon retaining them?

Having Persian women eschew the workplace and stay at home actually makes quite a bit of sense, especially in light of Iran's demographics. In the next few decades Iran is going to have a disporopionately huge elderly population due to the fact that Persian women are having far fewer children than they did in the past. It used to be that Persian women had something like 5 kids on average - now they have something like 1.5 children (I'm being approximate here since I don't have the stats in front of me). Since it is unlikely that Persia will have anything close to the medical and nursing home infrastructure necessary to provide for this elderly population, it will make the most sense for stay-at-home wives to provide for their parents and grand-parents at their houses rather than in some inpersonal hospital that only the very rich will be able to afford.

i have to agree with xsplat on this one; genetics won't matter in the long run because we'll be having designer babies within 40 years. More women considering a mother roles instead of a wage-earner role would be beneficial for population growth but what's the benefit of that?

I assume Iran has free university with a limited number of places per major, so maybe the women are ending up studying mining because of low demand, just to get a college slot, though they don't care about the major

The whole argument in the US is that the education system is failing the males since it is designed for women to succeed. In Iran, there is no presumption that they are favoring women in terms of education rigor. It is apparent that women are succeeding in Iran despite the obvious male bias. Of course, in the US, the quality and quantity of colleges are vastly different that Iran. Perhaps we are seeing the cream of the crop for female achievement. Nonetheless, it still shows that women are displacing men no matter what the circumstances. If women plays by men's rules, they can still succeed. This doesn't bode well for men.

Anyways, how do you solve the problem of hypergamy when the alternative was already discovered? A smart women just won't settle with any guy. You can't make a woman become a wife and mother if she doesn't want it. You'll have to stop educating women at the 9th grade equivalent.

You'll also have to vastly improve eduation for males. Not sure how to improve a system that is a failure for most men on the margins.

I don't think the government should be involved in education at all. That's where the educational problems in the U.S. stem from, the government's ever increasing intervention and corruption of the educational system which like everything is best run by the market. Government central planning of any sort doesn't work. Feminism is merely a branch of the larger socialist movement which is entirely dedicated to increasing government central planning over society.

Emma, centralized subsidies bloat any system and encourage malinvestment. It is in their nature.

The law of supply and demand is in full effect here: there's a massive supply of college graduates and no demand for them, and therefore the price for the glut of services is very nearly zero. (i.e. only 2% of that supply is being exchanged for money).

It is no different in the US, really. If there wasn't "worry free" debt so readily available to known high-risk debtor students, both tuition prices would plummet and enrollment would drop. Eventually, a college degree would be worth what it was back in the 60s instead of as the fading green card that it has become.

Emma, centralized subsidies bloat any system and encourage malinvestment. It is in their nature.

The law of supply and demand is in full effect here: there's a massive supply of college graduates and no demand for them, and therefore the price for the glut of services is very nearly zero. (i.e. only 2% of that supply is being exchanged for money).

It is no different in the US, really. If there wasn't "worry free" debt so readily available to known high-risk debtor students, both tuition prices would plummet and enrollment would drop. Eventually, a college degree would be worth what it was back in the 60s instead of as the fading green card that it has become.

"The whole argument in the US is that the education system is failing the males since it is designed for women to succeed. In Iran, there is no presumption that they are favoring women in terms of education rigor. It is apparent that women are succeeding in Iran despite the obvious male bias. Of course, in the US, the quality and quantity of colleges are vastly different that Iran. Perhaps we are seeing the cream of the crop for female achievement. Nonetheless, it still shows that women are displacing men no matter what the circumstances. If women plays by men's rules, they can still succeed. This doesn't bode well for men."

I'd love for someone to also explain this as well. How are women doing better than men once you control for affirmative action and all the other leg-ups they receive?

How can you control for any of that? It is no coincidence that the quality of higher education has fallen precipitously in conjunction with two things: the general increase in enrollment overall and the specific increase in female students.

The bell curve of college peers has measurably shifted to the left. Dumber peers and a less rigorous "higher" education system that rewards socialization is going be just the sort of thing where women compete and win - the same reason why when a boy has to wrestle girl in the state tournament, he won't dislocate both her arms and leave her convulsing on the mat, even though he'd do it in a heartbeat if he could to a male opponent. What seems like a "fair" match is really just the result of damaged integrity.

A woman who graduated from normal college in 1912 proved something as an individual. A woman who does it 100 years later is only proving something about an impoverished, overpriced system that measures nothing.

Men will be fine. They'll go where the action is. What it doesn't bode well for is higher education.

Please don't mistake me for a university advocate. I believe American universities should be burned with student aid workers inside.

But I disagree that higher education has reduced in quality. Rather, the bright population been ruthlessly sorted into the top colleges (a la Murray and Hernstein). The other colleges are merely churning out degrees.

One could anecdotally support the proposition that the ivy leagues are less academically challenging than prison life, but I think that is not much changed from the past. We only hear the success stories of MIT circa 1900, easily explicable from population filtering and random genius.

A woman who does it 100 years later is only proving something about an impoverished, overpriced system that measures nothing.

It is well-understood what college measures: IQ, conscientiousness, diligence, energy, agreeability, and the ability to eat an endless supply of bullshit and say "what delicious chocolate!"

@Jimmy"Perhaps we are seeing the cream of the crop for female achievement. Nonetheless, it still shows that women are displacing men no matter what the circumstances. If women plays by men's rules, they can still succeed. This doesn't bode well for men."

I don't see this connection. Iran has studies showing women with mining degrees are 98% UNemployed correlates to women succeeding under any circumstances in what way? Are you saying that the males there with mining degrees are 99% unemployed, because I didn't see that mentioned in the link. Rather it shows women utterly failing within a society that doesn't prop them up or provide advantages to them, admittedly in a society not predisposed to them in the first place.

I don't see this connection. Iran has studies showing women with mining degrees are 98% UNemployed correlates to women succeeding under any circumstances in what way?

No, the point seems to be this sentence in the original message: "The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences."

So, even if women may eventually fail to put their education in to good use, this would indeed seem to imply that women do better during the education even if the educational system was designed with men in mind.

This is a really disgusting development. Iran was looking like it was moving in a positive direction. I think feminism in the west is blight that is destroying the country. I also think explicitly barring women from fields of study is incredibly unfair and a huge step backwards.